Things start early on Parks Road,at the Keble College at Oxford. This year the Digital Humanities Summer School at Oxford (@dhoxss) comes back to a presencial, physical edition, after two years of online set ups. Yet still there is an online version for the ones that couldn't make it to the ancient university city. Of course, the opening session gives us a review of the potential held by AI to the field of music and its opportunities to the field of research. After a coffee break, we get to review of the methods used by digital humanities and examples of where it has been used, such as crowdsourcing, databases, digitalization, etc. Do you need to learn python to be a. digital humanist? Megan Gooch (@agneatha) thinks no. She is one of the leading voices of the event and she is opening the sessions.
What is DDHH?. With this question the event starts, and not without reason. The organiser's aim is to stress that this is more an approach than a discipline per se, and that at the current pace of developments, every field of humanities will be/would be/should be digital. Thus is a mean to an end and not a goal itself. Of course there are nuances in the practicalities of every faculty, where it might need to be emphasized the use of digital technologies. The discipline in fact, had something akin to an exixtenital crisis some years ago. So as definitions go, this is an open and dynamkc field. This panorama will be evident some days later, when a panel discudsed what would be the skills digital humanists would have in the future. Aong the suggestions of what should be taught in the next editions, suggestion about learning Python code, visualization tools, communicational approaches, that is different directipns that show a multiformed field that want to build bridges.
But back to the opening talk. She lists the big issues out there: storage, preservation, access and findability, all coming in package with rampant evolution of technologies available to do the research work, from obsolete formats every five years to access, ethics (remember the team making "sing" an Egyptian mummy?the need for context for the use of technology in digital humanities, not just use it for the sake of novelty. ) and copyright (ethics and intellectual property clash at the very notion of property) as well as training (acquiring skills is the reason we are here afterall). How do you train a digital humanist? The field is so vast and multiform that can feel vague; because of the multidisciplinary, humanities are about working with other people.
Then David De Roure (@dder) shows us the zooniverse, a crow-sourced, people-powered research effort made by volunteers collaborating in science projects, successful example of engagement. The people classifying the galaxies are Abel to talk to each other and they are not isolated interventions, polishing the added knowledge. Think of wikipedia fro galaxies, with a more rigorous scientific approach. Somebody asks about NFTs. We got to a break and waith fot hte next talk, about the "pandemic turn". An academic sitting in a crossroads of science and sociology, David is a leading voice orchestrating the multiple talents congregated here.
Eleanor O'keefe is the next lecturer at 4 pm, talking about digital
tools used to study timely data. She is talking about a project where
the scope of nethodological approaches that is DDHH is applied: aa
glance into the multidisciplinary project called
Social Distance, Digital Congregation:British Ritual Innovation). It
included a vast group of scholars and experts, looking at the impact of
COVID 19 in the lithurgy. The research was complicated , going through
many lockdown set ups. The pandemic forced,
increased digital acculturation in daily life, work and education as
well as socio-technical solution (detection apps, etc). The massive
disruption caused by the pandemic makes us question: What kind of
changes the pandemic brought?Was there a pandemic online
memorial "boom", what was the ethical implications?. One of the
essential recommendation made was the creation of memorial spaces, where
people can find a sense of empathy and solidarity.
This, beyond
good-felling intentions was a matter of societal importance
given the context. One was create by St Pauls catedral with 11 200
entries which was a small number but at the time was significant. Other
memorial struggle to keep with the rhythm of deaths. This is a cultural
change. Very basic technology but very symbolic.
Memorial before were spaces and monuments. Sculptures, Gardens,
Installations, nature placed memorials were planned in 2020 as well as
online site. However places as Twitter begun to become spaces of
convergence for the grief and anxiety, as well as discussions
about fairness and politics in the midst of the pandemic.Twitter
feeling is good for its granularity.The research aimed to know how the
process informed the practice, the impact of pandemic on memorial making
and to encourage cultural due diligence. The process
was ethnographic (fieldwork interview), empirical,(media analysis)
quantitative (distanced reading) and ethical analysis(framing the whole
phenomenon). The data was sensitive in the heat of the moment. The whole
memorial required a lot of partners. Among them
specially communication partners. All this reinforced by the symbolic
power of St Paul. Users were encouraged to enter info about their
relatives, one foto per each person. Many people send pictures in a
group, but they were cropped to manage GDPR possible
issues.This creates a issue for moderation, that was made by human
moderators' also to ask who was the user filling the form. Semiotically
it was to be created as interfaith place, searching for interfaith
symbols such as the candle. Most of the dedicators
(2928) were the children of the deceased, followed by spouses and
siblings, most of them, women, maybe because usually omen organize the
arrangements of the death: funerals, masses, etc but also because of the
demographic impact of the pandemic. The Remember
me however was not the unique place, however it was a digital contact
zone, endorsed by different community leaders.76% f and 72% m were
defined as family member, 25% of w and 27% of men were defined by
character and 4% w and 10% deified by work. Such an experience
in defining our collective afterlife is linked to the future of digital
humanities is entwined with these type of changes, in the cultural
infrastructures.
_______________________________________________
"How massive deaths were deal with, ritually? From specific web
tools to voice recreation, the imagery range is vast. Does the internet
change how we die and mourn?Walter, Tony; Moncur Wendy and Pitsillides,
Stacey."
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